Mel Gibson steps back into the spotlight

By Geoff Boucher

SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Mel Gibson took a deep breath, shook his head and stared down at his palms. “I just can’t do this. You’ve got me at a disadvantage.” The movie star, his voice a croak, was a mere 19 minutes into an interview, but it was clear there was no way he was going to make it to 20.

“I’m coming rapidly to the conclusion that right now, today, my brain cannot function. Honestly? I’m six days off the cigarette. You’re looking at someone who’s having a pretty bad withdrawal from a 45-year habit.”

The question that sent the jittery Gibson on his way out of the room was about the cultural riptides that await anyone who brings religion into the modern public life of Hollywood. “I’m not running away from it. I want to give you a fair trot. I like where you’re coming from with these questions. I just feel ill-equipped to answer.”

These are difficult days to be Mel Gibson, with or without nicotine.

On Friday, the 54-year-old will find out where he stands with moviegoers as a leading man with “Edge of Darkness,” a dark thriller that marks Gibson’s first starring role since “Signs” in 2002. In those eight years, he has devoted himself instead to producing and directing, most notably the massively successful “The Passion of the Christ” in 2004. He also found himself starring in a bleary mug shot in summer 2006 after a DUI arrest that would become a life-changing calamity after the anti-Semitic remarks he made while in custody were reported across the planet. Gibson apologized and called it “a moment of insanity” and a “public humiliation on a global scale” that had one positive aspect in that it led him to get help with his alcoholism.

Three days later, Gibson looked like a new man. “I’m sorry again,” he said as he reached out to shake hands, “I was in pretty rough shape. Today is better. Nine days is better than six.”

Putting in time is never easy. Gibson was standing in a suite at the Casa Del Mar Hotel in Santa Monica, where he was enduring two long days of press interviews to promote the new movie from Warner Bros. and GK Films. The place was crowded with reporters eager for their chance to get Gibson on the record about his DUI, the anti-Semitic rant and the recent juicy twists in his personal life (Gibson is in the process of divorcing his wife of 29 years, Robyn, with whom he has seven children; 39-year-old Russian musician Oksana Grigorieva, meanwhile, gave birth to the actor’s eighth child, Lucia, on the day before Halloween).

“It’s going OK,” Gibson said gamely of his movie-star chores. “It’s always a struggle. This part has always been a struggle to sort of friend-up and be that.”

The whole Mad Mel persona shaped Gibson’s stardom with the nut-job cop role in the four “Lethal Weapon” films and then the far-from-funny battlefield rages in the gore of “Braveheart” and “The Patriot.” The angry man is back in Gibson’s new movie; the actor said he chose “Edge of Darkness” for his return vehicle for the simple reason that it had an excellent script by William Monahan (who won an Oscar for “The Departed”), but it’s probably no coincidence that the movie falls into the uniquely American cinema of vengeance — playing the righteous and violent man has given Gibson some of his biggest commercial successes.

In “Edge of Darkness,” Gibson portrays Thomas Craven, a Boston cop whose daughter is gunned down. “I’m the guy with nothing to lose,” he snarls in the trailer for the film, “fasten your seat belt.” Just like the instantly infamous “Get off my lawn!” line in the ads for Clint Eastwood’s tough-geezer film “Gran Torino,” there’s a satisfying click to hearing Gibson get back to the basics of his popcorn menace.